Let me explain...no, we have no time. Let me sum up.

The title of this post is paraphrased from The Princess Bride.

This last semester was rough. Not too long after my last post, the CHI submission deadline past. I'm writing this post from my hostel room in Vancouver, so that should tell you what happened with that submission. (It was accepted.) I went through the appeals process, and was told that I would have to both retake my qualifying exam AND take an automata class. Only a week or so after that, I lost one of my best friends to a sudden illness.

I flew back home to California for her funeral. It was unbelievably hard. Jessica was the first person that I lost since I was a very small child, and it still doesn't make any sense. I was back in classes not too long after that, struggling to be functional. I sat my qualifying exams for the third time in late March, not at my best by far.

Throughout this, I've been continuing work on the EcoCollage project, setting up my new website, working on a group project in my HCI course that went haywire during the data collection because it's very difficult to get eye-tracking to work well when you've never used that hardware before. We ended up performing the entire experiment for a second time, three weeks from the due date, and pushing through the analysis on time. My most sincere regret is that we weren't able to submit an IRB application in time, so /this/ set of data can not be submitted to CHI, despite the lack of personal identifiers.

In late April I was informed that once again, I received conditional passes. I pretty much resigned myself to finding a job. My adviser? Not so much. My adviser pushed hard on the committee, emphasizing both the publications I have and the work I've done and the person I am, until they said, "fine" and requested that I take the algorithms class at UIC. This is a good thing, as I am certainly not sufficiently algo'd up. I'll be taking the class with a professor I find fascinating, who is tough but fair, which I need. This is lesson number one of graduate school: your adviser is your one and only advocate. Their interest in you can save your career.

So at this moment, I'm in a pretty good mood. Again, I'm going to make a steady attempt to push hard on actually using this blog. The next few posts will be advice about attending a conference on the magnitude of CHI, and some tips that I learned. Since I'm unfortunately too aware of how few people read this, I'm going to put blog-writing in my calendar as a weekly(?) activity, until I grow accustomed to it.